Welcome

This manual aims to provide the tutor, lecturer, or management trainer with supporting material for using my book – Market-Led Strategic Change: Transforming The Process of Going To Market, 5th edition (Routledge, 2016) – henceforth MLSC. For the most part, this consists of suggestions for the type of learning outcomes that can be achieved with the material in each part of the book, together with exercises around the examples in each chapter, and slide masters.

Section II consists of these chapter-by-chapter commentaries and suggestions, as well as guidelines for using the case studies in MLSC.

The slides are provided in Section III of the manual. The idea is that all the figures and exhibit material in the book should be available to you, so you can integrate them with your own display material. However, if you need it, there are enough slides to provide you with a complete lecture or set of classes around the material in each chapter. The Key take-aways at the end of each chapter summarize what I think each chapter is really about, and I have included these as slides for classroom discussion and tutorial work, in case this is also helpful.

Those who have used the earlier editions of MLSC should be warned that the changes made for the 5th edition are fairly substantial, and this manual replaces earlier workbooks and manuals.

In developing the 5th edition of MLSC, I have also replaced the cases that were in the 4th edition but have included them at the end of this manual, together with the original teaching notes, as additional materials if you need them. (I hope this will assist those of you who have developed your own exercises around the 4th edition cases to continue using those resources. However, those cases have not been updated and remain as printed in the earlier editions. They are located in Section IV of the manual.

The most difficult challenge in putting this support material together is the flexibility of the MLSC material. I have used the MLSC material in delivering courses all the way from executive education short courses through full-time and part-time MBA and MSc programmes, to advanced undergraduate classes. The growing use has been to provide the marketing module as a core requirement on new MSc management programmes. I have also applied the material to the business strategy and marketing module on a life sciences MSc, and it has been used for a commercialization module on an MSc in product development and innovation. The material is very flexible if you adapt the presentation for different audiences.

Clearly, the material does have to be presented in different ways to these different audiences, and the additional reading and assignment requirements differ substantially. Nonetheless, the material seems to span all these levels and participant types. One of the things that has pleased me most with the MLSC material is the feedback from course participants of different kinds suggesting that they have actually read the book and enjoyed it. I have made substantial efforts to retain this accessibility and “user-friendliness” in the 5th edition. People say that you can’t get executives and part-time students to read – well, they read this stuff! The downside is that this makes it difficult to offer you precise recommended course structures, and the onus of selectivity in which material and exercises to use for which courses remains on you (which, come to think of it, is probably what most teachers prefer anyway).

The goal of the manual is to work through the MLSC 5th edition chapters in sequence and suggest to you what you can use the material to achieve with different types of course participant, to provide you with some exercises that can be undertaken in seminars or work groups, and to offer you slides to use in class session, if you need them. The manual also offers discussion frameworks for each of the 12 cases in the 5th edition of the book.

Incidentally, I am always open to feedback and suggestions about the best ways to use the MLSC material with course participants. Please feel free to write to me or email at [email protected].

Using the instructor’s manual

The structure of the manual is very straightforward – the chapter-by chapter commentaries and case guidelines (Section II) are intended to give you some suggestions about how to use the material in MLSC for courses in marketing and strategic marketing or business strategy. The material is very flexible, so you can pick and choose from these suggestions as best suits your particular purpose at the time.

Some general comments about the material are followed by suggestions for exercises – mainly involving the Reality checks in the chapter. These exercises can generally be adapted in how you use them for course participants ranging from the full-time student to the management participant in a short course, or an in-company workshop group.

Section III consists of the slides for each chapter, along with the Key take-aways for each. This slide pack has been designed so you can pick up a block of slides as a “ready-made” presentation on a key topic, or pick and choose among the slides for those that fit best with your own material for a particular course or programme.

As noted earlier, Section IV contains additional case material in the form of the cases that were in MLSC 4th edition, but that were not included in the 5th edition. This is mainly for the benefit of those who have prepared sessions around these cases and want to continue using them. I am still using Tesco – fresh & queasy, for example, because it still works and can be updated very easily.